Visiting the Relatives

A Gold Plated Life

827 Elmwood Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island

Robert Anthony Lynch worked in jewelry factories his whole life. In 1915, at the age of 16, he was an “errand boy.” By 1930, he was a “gold plater,” which was considered a good skill to have at the time in Providence, Rhode Island—the Jewelry Capital of the world. Gold plating was actually invented in Providence in 1794 by Nehemiah Dodge. That was the start of a very long stretch of jewelry dominance for the city. In the 1940s, 80% of all costume jewelry made in America came from Rhode Island. Two of Robert’s three brothers (one being my grandfather) also worked for a time in jewelry factories. By 1978, the industry employed over 40,000 workers in the state. Since then, foreign competition has taken its toll on the business, yet it remains an important part of the state’s economy.

From 1930 to 1940, Robert and his wife, Alice, then a stenographer at City Hall, rented an apartment in this house on a busy street in the Elmwood neighborhood of Providence. The Lynches were both the children of immigrants. A year after having their daughter Joan, they moved to the Washington Park neighborhood where they lived for the rest of their lives. Robert died at the age of 63.

Jewelry Workers, Providence, Rhode Island, 1915

Witch Witnesses

I have 2048 9x great-grandfathers. Technically, everyone does. We have two birth parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents…it just keeps doubling. I’d never be able to trace them all, particularly in Ireland where an overwhelming majority of my ancestry comes from. However, for the thin slice of my father’s Colonial predecessors, history has been very well documented and I can dig up fascinating things from family of long, long ago.

Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a very well-preserved coastal town with the largest collection of first generation Colonial houses in America. Take, for instance, this old house of Reginald Foster, a 9x great-grandfather of mine which I visited last summer. Foster moved to this lot around 1658 and whether this house was here, or whether they built it later is unclear—but he certainly lived here.

Reginald was an immigrant from Exeter, Devon, England, and came from a well-regarded family. In 1638, with his wife Judith and their seven children, he sailed to and settled in Ipswich. Reginald served as a town planner and a surveyor of roads in the area, and owned part of Plum Island, as well.

What makes the Fosters particularly interesting to me is their small connection to the famous Salem Witch Trials. Reginald’s sons, Issac and Reginald Jr., were signers of a petition to save the life of John Proctor, the first man accused and arrested for being a witch. Proctor had previously lived in the Fosters’s neighborhood before moving to Salem, and a number of his old friends vouched for his innocence. (Another signer was William Story, my 8x great-grandfather.) Unfortunately, the petition was unsuccessful and John Proctor was hung not long after. John Proctor’s story was the basis for the great American play The Crucible, by Arthur Miller.

1692 Petition signatures in support of John Proctor, on trial for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts

Descendents of Reginal Foster book, 1876

Illustration of John Proctor, artist and date unknown

Westward Days

Annisquam River, Gloucester, Massachusetts

Nathaniel Day was the fifth child of English immigrants Anthony Day and Susanna Ring Matchett who lived on the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where I drew last summer. Nathaniel was born on December 9, 1665, and he’s my 6x great-grandfather. His family moved around Cape Ann—north of Boston—quite a bit, before settling by Pole’s Hill.

Nathanial married Ruth Rowe from Gloucester in 1689, and moved 80 miles southeast to the inland settlement of Attleborough, Massachusetts (part of the settlement of Rehoboth). Since I had no idea until this project that I had any early American relatives, it was extra surprising to find that Nathaniel and Ruth were buried only about five miles from where I grew up in Cumberland, Rhode Island. My town, too, was part of Rehoboth back then, called Attleborough Gore. Nathaniel and Ruth’s son Benjamin moved further west to Connecticut after he married local girl Mary Robinson in 1714 and left my neighborhood behind.

Gravestone of Nathaniel Day, 1735, Newell Cemetery, Attleboro, Massachusetts

Deacon Francis Parott Esq.

Francis Parrat, my 8x great-grandfather, arrived in America back in 1638 with his two sisters, Ann and Faith. They were part of a big group of followers of Reverend Ezekiel Rogers who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from Rowley, Yorkshire, England. Soon after arriving, Francis married Elizabeth Northend, another immigrant who also came over from Yorkshire with siblings. The Rogers group founded the town of Rowley, up the coast from Salem and Ipswich, Massachusetts. Francis—a lawyer—was very well educated for his time. He held a number of leadership positions in the town including Town Clerk and Rowley’s first representative to the Massachusetts Courts. He helped survey and assign the first property lots in the town, assigning himself this one, on which now stand a couple of old houses which were built later (including this one). By 1655, he was also a deacon of the Rowley church. Francis died on a trip back to England in 1656. Elizabeth remarried and moved to the nearby village of Bradford.

Francis and Elizabeth had six daughters, the second of whom, Faith, is the next in line on my family tree. She married another deacon, Ezekiel Jewett, the son of another founder of the town. I found Faith’s gravestone in the Old Burial Ground in Rowley. Here’s what is says:

HERE LYES Ye BODY OF Mrs FAITH JEWET, WIFE TO DECON EZEKIEL JEWET DIED OCTOr Ye 15 1715 & IN Ye 74 YEARE OF HER AGE.

Old Burial Ground, Rowley, Massachusetts

Tapping

179 Byfield Street, Lower South Providence Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

This is a noisy place, and it must have been even noisier back in the 1960s when James (Jimmy) and Alice O’Keefe lived here. From their doorstep, they could watch as the city was ripped in half by the massive interstate highway project—the construction of US Route 95. Their neighborhood was wiped away. As I drew by the freeway, the soundtrack was a rhythm of whooshing and blurping from trucks and cars, behind and below.

Jimmy O’Keefe came to America with his family from rural East Cork, Ireland, as a very young boy in 1906. He grew up to become a bricklayer. Toward the end of his life, he lived on a floor of this house on Byfield Street in South Providence. Jimmy was my mother’s uncle, who, according to my parents, tap danced at their wedding reception. That was his thing. He had a portable section of wooden flooring that he brought with him for tap performances for friends and family—often accompanied by his older brother Mike, who played the accordion. That’s a degree of Irish-Americanness that had faded by my time.

This leads me to wonder more about the noise in this house, and about the other families who lived here. I’m curious what floor Jimmy lived on and how often he tap danced at home

A Shock from Fort Cumberland

King’s Chapel from The Old Burial Ground, Boston, Massachusetts

The iconic facade of King’s Chapel in Boston is hidden now under construction tarps. All you can see is a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter banner. The view is better from the Old Burial Ground next door—the oldest cemetery in Boston. It was here that I came, soon after I found the upsetting and ugly truth that an ancestor of mine had owned a slave.
The story comes from Nova Scotia, actually, but has Boston roots. I came upon it in the book The Siege of Fort Cumberland by Ernest Clark, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Clark tells the story of a battle on the far fringes of the American Revolutionary War in 1775—in Cumberland County, on the border with New Brunswick. The small battle’s history is interesting to me because that’s where my Canadian ancestors lived, and it turns out, a number of them were involved. But it was a shocking side note that blew me away.

Samuel Wethered owned a tavern near Fort Cumberland, which was hit by a cannonball. “Wethered lay in the rubble grievously wounded. His pregnant Black slave (who worked at the tavern) collapsed in shock and went into premature labour.”

Wait. What? Samuel Wethered was my 4x great-grandfather.
Wethered’s life started here, in Boston, in 1738. All of his siblings were baptized in King’s Chapel (and perhaps he was, too, but I don’t have a record of that). King’s Chapel, at the time, was the church of the British ruling class in Boston. Samuel’s father, an immigrant from Kent, England, who served the elite in the tavern he owned nearby. (But more about him later.) Samuel Wethered left Boston for Nova Scotia soon after marrying Dorothy Eager in this very church in 1761. At that time, there were slaves in Boston. What was Samuel’s slave’s name? Did she come from Boston? Were there others? The answers to those and other questions, I don’t know. What I do know is that she died soon after the incident, and he died not long after that.

As I stood drawing among the distinguished colonial dead, I wished to be less a part of this American story.

Rowley Settlers

30 Bradford Street, Rowley, MA — 30 Bradford Street, Rowley, Massachusetts

On my first drive through Rowley, Massachusetts, I passed this house and wished it was mine—to draw, that is. I love drawing old houses and the more wear and tear they have, the better. However, research led me further down the street to a far less interesting spot — a bend in the road where my map of the 1639-50 Rowley house lots placed me at the property of my 8x great-grandfather, Maximillian Jewett. My drawing session was so unsatisfactory that I came back a week later. Perhaps because my second trip was from a different direction, I realized upon return that this house was, indeed, where the Jewetts’s properties were. Or at least damn close. Lucky me—I could draw this old colonial house afterall.

Maximillian Jewett was a big deal in this town—a founder, a deacon in the church, a town selectman, and a representative to the general court for many years. He was the second biggest taxpayer in town at some point. Jewett was an immigrant, too. He, his wife, Ann, and his brother, Joseph, were part of the 20-family group that followed the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers, a nonconformist Puritan preacher from Yorkshire, England, to the young Massachusetts Bay Colony. They landed in 1638 in Salem, and established a settlement up the coast soon after. Maximillian and Joseph drew lots next to each other on what became Bradford Street, named for their hometown. This was not a Jewett house, it should be said; it was built around 1800 for another family. My lineage stayed in Rowley for two generations and then moved a little west to Boxford.

In the old Rowley Burial Ground sits a monument that celebrates Maximillian and Joseph Jewett. Their graves had been unmarked until 1912, when “The Jewett Family of America” marked their place in history into a large boulder. They would not be forgotten. While walking around this old cemetery in the center of town, and all the others that I visit, I see no stones or monuments to the real settlers of this area, the Native Americans. All those names are lost.

Rowley Burial Ground, Main Street, Rowley, Massachusetts

Short Story

Essex Shipbuilders Museum, Essex, Massachusetts

A sign by the side of the road at the water’s edge in Essex, Massachusetts, says, “In 1668 the town granted the adjacent acre of land to inhabitants of Ipswich for a yard to build vessels and to employ workmen for that end. The shipbuilding industry has continued uninterruptedly in Essex since that date.”

In 1813, that acre became known as the Story Shipyard where the descendants of William Story built boats for generations. I’m a descendent of William Story as well. He was my 8x Great Grandfather and an early white settler of this area in the 1600s. William was an immigrant from Norwich, England—a carpenter who established a mill not far from here on the river, near where it meets the sea.

Unlike the boatbuilders, however, my ancestral connection to Essex is a very short story. William’s daughter Hannah married in 1683 and moved away to Rowley, another marshy town up the coast. Alas, there is probably no boat-building in my blood.

Essex, however, will remain close to my heart, or I should say stomach because of another claim to fame for this little town. That is, the invention of the fried clam. Woodman’s, a family restaurant in Essex founded in 1914, claims credit for this New England delicacy, and they’re still serving them today from their roadside/marsh-side location. (There are a number of great fried clam vendors in the area.) Not many summers go by when I don’t celebrate the season with a heaping pile of fried whole belly clams (with french fries, coleslaw, and a cold beer), as I did on the day of this drawing.

So Many Sullivans

Soon after her husband died in 1898, my great-grandmother Mary Sullivan Lynch moved into this mill house in Norwich, Connecticut, with her son Timothy. This was one of a number of identical brick houses, built by the Yantic River in 1855 for workers of the big Falls Company textile mill, a short walk away. These boxy brick homes always remind me of the hotel markers in the game Monopoly.

The Lynches lived here for a few years while Timothy worked in the mill. At 20, he was the youngest surviving child of Mary’s nine children, all born in County Kerry, Ireland, three of whom died very young. When the family came in 1884, they not only joined lots of Lynch relatives, but also Sullivans. It’s very difficult, however, to track the Sullivans because there are just so many in Kerry and in Connecticut. Not only is Sullivan (along with O’Sullivan) the third most prevalent name in Ireland, but it’s highly concentrated in the country’s southwest corner, where I research. To distinguish the different Sullivan families there, they would use a second name—the two biggest being the Sullivan Beara’s (meaning “the ones from the Beara Peninsula”) and the Sullivan Mor’s (meaning “larger or greater”). Mary might have been a Sullivan Combaugh, from Valentia Island. Who knows. These qualifiers were never official, and aren’t much help to me anyway since they fell away upon immigration. Not surprisingly, both of Mary’s parents were Sullivans.

Boat Builders

In 1813, the Story family established their shipyard in Essex, Massachusetts, where the Essex Shipbuilding Museum is now. That’s where I found this charming old “trunnel” shed—a term that means the builders used wooden pegs to fasten the pieces of wood together, like those used in boat building. A nearby marker states that 4000 boats were built in this saltwater marshy area between 1650 and 1982. My guess is that the Storys built quite a few of those boats through the generations.

As to whether or not a Story built this shed was difficult for me to nail down.

Around 1650 is when my 8x great-grandfather William Story came here. He was an immigrant from Norwich, England who first arrived in Ipswich in 1637. In an early map you can find his prime riverfront lot, where now sits a huge glorious house. William sold that land and moved a little south to the area then known as Chebacco—later to become the town of Essex.